Why business is driving SaaS adoption

I recorded a podcast earlier this week. It's now live here:

Phil Wainewright on why business is driving SaaS adoption

In it, I discuss a topic that's attracted a lot of comment on this blog over the past week: The love-hate relationship between IT shops and SaaS. Paul Gillin, the podcast host, picked out this statement of mine as the standfirst for the recording:

"Business people love SaaS software, on-demand software. IT people kind of hate it, but would probably like it better if they understood it better."

The podcast is part of a series interviewing speakers at the forthcoming SaaScon conference next month in San Francisco (disclosure: I'm on the advisory board of SaaScon but have no commercial interest in the conference. The organizers are contributing some of my travel and accommodation expenses).

Apart from being a live demonstration of why I'm more comfortable blogging than being interviewed, the podcast picks up several themes about IT and SaaS. For example, the usual excuses you'll hear from IT to avoid examining SaaS fairly:

"It's very convenient to pick up things like security and data ownership, but these are red herrings."

I then go on to talk about why the combined momentum of SOA, Web 2.0 and SaaS is putting a services mentality at the heart of IT, and IT people will just have to overcome their lack of confidence in handling these things:

"If you want to stay on top of it then you're going to have to embrace it, because it's an unstoppable tide."

We finish with some discussion of the application categories where SaaS is making big strides, along with the extent to which enterprise software vendors are challenged by the SaaS model.